Gross Point #7

This Christmas themed issue was one of those books that I had never heard of before but came across in my research on Christmas and holiday themed comic books. The premise is that a father with the last name of Pickett, gets a job in the town of Gross Point and moves his wife and kids to the weirdest burgh in all the 50 states. 

In this issue, the dad's boss has created a Christmas wish-list for himself. Any employee who doesn't make a purchase from it will find themselves unemployed. The gift Mr. Pickett buys ends up being like $10,000! The fam can't afford that! And with the industrial sized nose trimmer being engraved, it cannot be returned. Thus, Christmas is cancelled!

There's a backup story in this issue as well. It's not Christmas themed and it requires readers to have some prior knowledge of events that took place in previous issues. Here, Mrs. Pickett gets a new job as a tour guide of a toy factory. Things seem to be going okay until they're hexed with a voodoo curse and doomed to act out the actions of the newest set of toys being played by a focus group of destructive youngsters!

Let's go back to the main reason I bought this issue: the holiday themed hi-jinx. For one thing, I hated it. Throughout the story, there's a large tower in the center of town where people are continuously throwing themselves off of and committing suicide. Profiting off of this is a noted psychiatrist named Dr. Goodbai. Assisting him are several beauties who are persuading citizens to give into their holiday depressions and end it all.

It no way is suicide light-hearted. My best friend killed himself. It was one of the worst weekends of my life having to comfort his wife, claim the body and make burial arrangements. Nobody should ever have to go it alone. Nobody should ever have to experience all that. 

Now there was an element of the Christmas yarn that was pretty funny. The two kids in the Pickett family experience what life would be like for their parents if they weren't born. Turns out, it would have been fabulous! That ironic twist on It's A Wonderful Life was funny. But it could not excuse the plethora of jokes about suicide.

This 1997 book was published by DC Comics. I'm wondering why it wasn't published by their Vertigo imprint. This sort of edgy stuff seems to fit right in with titles like Preacher and Hellblazer. If you added some swears and maybe a little more T&A, Gross Point might have flourished as a Vertigo title. What was DC thinking publishing an ongoing series that had nothing to do with superheroes or an established licensed franchise?

I guess I'll keep this book since it is a holiday book and I might one day need this for research purposes. But it's definitely not one of my favorites.

Not Worth Consuming!

Rating: 3 out of 10 stars.